


Send a Postcard From Down the Street

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Banter, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Prompt Fill, Santos Administration, Season/Series 07, Talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28259976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: The phone still rings off the hook, no surprise there.-anonymous asked: donna and sam s7, during transition maybe with samjosh?
Relationships: Donna Moss & Sam Seaborn, Joey Lucas/Donna Moss, Josh Lyman/Sam Seaborn
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18





	Send a Postcard From Down the Street

_iii. hear it, see it; grab it, keep it_

So it’s this great gap made by fourteen hundred days. A grand canyon without the posterity or national acclaim. Yet mostly it’s a matter of looking back on what they had and what they didn’t and seeing that choice changes and changes make choice, or something like that.

The chasm—rift, if that wasn’t so melodramatic—split the country down its middle like a stale cracker and they disposed of it dutifully between themselves, each party to this new sort of thing allegedly called a life. No one cross this line, no one toe this one, and everyone, for the love of something, play it cool unless— _until_ —absolutely necessary not to. The phone lines would come to curdle with the weight of every word they sent back and forth across the barricade, but that wasn’t cheating. Not anymore than was allowed, or expected.

_iii. correspondent in the field_

On her side of things, Donna has an office. It’s bigger than a broom closet, better than a cubicle, and sports an entire window, all hers. Sam has an office, too. He hates it, point blank, but he doesn’t say that because rocking the boat only seems fun when you’re on the shore.

There’s this one moment in December that neither of them have the sight to see, unfathomably aligned down to the second. Donna’s in D.C., excelling like a new monarch, and across the country Sam is watching Josh’s retreating back knowing it’s not all quite his yet.

But for the distance, the sun is the same one no matter how you slice it, and as one door closes three more open on work to be done.

_iii. who wants to be a millionaire_

Generally, Donna enjoys the perks of having moved up in the world. She enjoys it much the same way she assumes surgeons like getting to hold a scalpel after cutting their teeth in scut or pianists like getting to play something real after agonizing over their scales. That’s to say, she appreciates not having to get coffee for other people, and when it comes time there are people she can ask (with the seasoned gratitude of someone who once retrieved the coffees) to get hers.

But sitting now, cross-legged and barefoot on the floor of her office with papers flagging every inch around her, she generally disdains the advent of ink and the printing press and the word bureaucratic. Also the Department of Agriculture, the abacus, and fax machines. And finally, but most importantly, the entire burdensome breezeway of moving up in the world.

She’s supposed to be digesting this report so she can, in turn, make it make sense to the imminent First Lady, should she have any questions. There’s a spiteful part of Donna that wants to delegate the task, but there’s also an anarchic part of her that wants to disassemble or otherwise maim every printer in the building save for the one in the basement she came to love because she can trust it not to print a 200 page report entirely out of order. She’s not exact in the business of listening to parts of herself for this reason. All or nothing, that’s the motto of the day.

She’s fielding propositions that today’s the worst day possible.

It’s very nearly a relief when her cell rings some two hours into her Sisyphean task. _Nearly_ because alongside her other generalizations, she generally likes when her phone rings, except for the times she doesn’t, which is shaping up to be all twenty-four hours of the day. When she climbed the ladder, her work bypassed some ceiling she hadn’t known it to be hitting and stopped going entirely through her pager. So now, any time her phone rings, she has to either worry that it’s her mother or a national emergency. She misses the novelty of choice as presented by her pager more than she has any right to, and she finally understands why all her friends detest the very sight of all electronic communication devices.

She picks her phone up distractedly, leveraging it open with her thumb as she switches an eighth page out for a third. In addition to the printer fritzing on the order, it had started running out of ink somewhere along the way as well, so the numbers are scratchy at best. The ringing grows more insistent to her ears as she swaps a sixteenth page for a hundred and sixteenth page and she sighs, refocusing. Which is good. Even giving it her full attention, she can’t entirely make sense of the name spelled out in greenish-white on the rinky-dink screen. It’s been weeks, months even, since she’s seen that particular shape.

SAM (CELL)

There’s a real chance she still has three other numbers saved for him, never sure where he’ll be. She doesn’t even know if any of them are still working, or if, in time, they’re out of date, too, left behind when he—she won’t say _fled_ because that’s harsh, and logically it’s been enough years for her to have moved beyond it, but he hadn’t exactly done it slowly, had he?

“You’ve reached Donna Moss,” she answers precariously, bracing herself for whatever way this goes. With Sam, the art of the out-of-the-blue phone call is one of both decadence and mastery. It can be anything from happy—if not general—news to a bad break of sizeable proportions to him having been hit by a bolt of holy lightning and wising up to the fact that he can be a foul excuse for a friend at times.

“Is the cream cheese fresh?” Donna receives in place of any sane opening line.

Donna blinks, each one clacking in her head. Her mouth is stalled out somewhere a mile back and she can’t read the map for the wind batting it into her face. “Is this a code?” she settles on, “Are you in peril?”

"Is the—hold on, sorry, I thought I’d have to call more than once—yes, the ch—okay, yeah, that’ll work. Thanks. Donna? Are you still there?”

“So you thought the best place to attempt the first call was in line for that bagel cart you like so much?” she says more than asks, somewhere between endeared and incensed that he thought she wouldn’t _answer_. She knows firsthand that you take the call, even if you’re mad, even if you’re busy, you take the call. It only takes a split second, a missed call, then it’s all downhill toward regret.

“I was multi-tasking. Am multi-tasking. I’m also getting cream cheese on my tie. I think this works better if you’re about to take lunch—are you, by any chance?”

“Sure. Lunch. The breakfast of people that have lost complete and utter control of their lives. You know, last week I nearly ate a wax apple. It was five o’clock in the morning, and I almost ingested falsified fruits.” Which honestly wasn’t that much worse than her breakfast that morning of two stale coffees and a nectarine. It’s to be noted she hates nectarines and, to that end, doesn’t know where it came from.

She hears him stifle a laugh and imagines it twisting a smile onto his face like the end of a candy wrapper. “That’s certainly indicative,” he says.

“Of what? That I’m a zombie? And one that can’t even do the brains thing right, so I’m settling for wax fruit? Sam, I don’t even make sense to myself anymore, if you want to hang up I won’t blame you.”

“I stand by my decision to call.” His laugh, as it comes, is a comfort. Clear as a bell, even though there’s this thing underneath that she tucks away for later, something rigid that makes her untouchably sad.

“It’s your loss. How are you? Was the cream cheese fresh?” she asks, taking in the distance to the door and deciding against making a break for it. Instead she lays back in a pose reminiscent of her childhood hours spent hogging the kitchen phone—whose cord would stretch just far enough for her to lay on her bedroom floor and gossip with any of her childhood best friends, all of whom had been named some variation on Kimberly.

“It never hurts to ask! I realize I’m speaking to someone that doesn’t care what she ingests, but speaking as someone that nearly got food poisoning from an expired dairy product—”

"I don’t think that’s how food poisoning works. You can’t quantify it like—I mean, you either have it or you don’t.”

“I came close. Have you never had a brush with foodborne illness?”

“I just don’t think you get to pick and choose the threshold, that’s why there are _degrees_. You know, mild and raging, that sort of—do you hear yourself? You sound more unreasonable than I do.”

“I would like to point out that I never said unreasonable, I never _thought_ unreasonable, and I certainly never even tangentially entertained the consideration of the thought of unreasonable.”

She entertains the consideration of hitting her head against the wall, but ultimately doesn’t want damages taken out of her paycheck, so she refrains. “Well, maybe you almost did. Maybe you had a _brush_ with the assumption I’m unreasonable, but when it didn’t clear one particular deputized synapse, it didn’t count, since that’s how you seem to be qualifying things all willy-nilly around here.”

There’s a tense moment of silence before Sam asks, incredulous, _“Willy-nilly?”_ and the moment—the fight they’ve been raring up to have since he left—is over before it's begun.

“It’s not a very potent turn of phrase.”

“That it isn’t,” he agrees, and it’s the soft-Sam voice that makes the creases around his eyes relax and his shoulders sink. She wants, desperately, to hug him right that second. California sucks and D.C. sucks and the whole country shouldn’t be more than a mile wide, just so she can hug whoever the hell she wants whenever she pleases.

“The reason I called,” he starts up again, sounding less like the man on dry land and more like the one slowly drifting toward the middle of the lake without a paddle. “There are factors. It’s got something to do with how I’ve always counted on you to be entirely honest with me. I’ve always admired your honesty, frankly, it’s a trait to be coveted—”

“Sam?” she interjects not unkindly, knowing she has to cut him off before he completely unspools. “You don’t have to have qualifiers.”

“I need your ear on a personal matter.”

“How personal?” she asks, digging the heel of her palm into her eye. “See a doctor for a rash, a jeweler for a ring, and your nearest bartender for woes most unseemly.”

There had been a call like this a year and a half ago, _is this about a girl?_ she’d asked as a joke, and he’d gone quiet. They’d broken things off six months ago, last Donna heard. So she hopes it’s woes this time. She really, really hopes it’s woes.

When he sighs, she braces herself. “Have I been an idiot? More prudently, am I currently being one?” he asks with all the earnestness he’s got, which is a considerable amount. “And I don’t mean your run of the mill moron, I mean a stone-cold, astounding in my dedication to being as idiotic as I am, idiot.”

Her laughter jumps on her, leaving her to snort inelegantly into the mic and try her best not to crumple any of the report from hell with a wide elbow. _“No!”_ she finally manages, but the effect is lost in the fact that she’s crowing like the dawn rooster.

He bites off his own laugh in neat little chunks, leaving behind no crumbs, and she tries to imagine his shoulders shaking, the self-conscious way they’d pinch forward. She tries to imagine him on the floor beside her, laughing like kids, and it sobers her.

Donna wants to apologize, but for the life of her, she can’t figure out what for. A lot of things, probably, but right then the thought hits her: _I’m sorry it was easy._ Because it was; as much as he ran, they let him go.

“Sam, I don’t think you’re an idiot,” she expels with a hitching gait, quiet and warm and still mirthful. “Not this time, anyway. I mean, you’ve had your moments, but this…it was complicated. _Is_ complicated. I don’t know if there was a right answer or a wrong one, I think it just—I think it was an is and was thing. It is what it is, was what it was.”

“I don’t know if I believe that.”

“Of course you don’t, you’re a dowsing rod for morality, you’re the _poster child_ for the opposite of ambiguity. You wouldn’t know a gray area if it tapped you on the shoulder—that’s what I’m here for.”

“Did you know?” he asks abruptly, and sighs again. He’s halfway to his head in his hands, she can tell these things.

Did she know Josh was going to go after him? Yes. That was indisputable fact in her mind. Did she know Josh was going to get on a plane and show up on Sam’s proverbial doorstep? Not in so many words, but it hadn’t exactly surprised her. Josh is impulsive to a point of oblivion and yet just as, if not more, calculating than anyone she’s ever met. And crunching the numbers on him and Sam isn’t exactly rocket science, then or now.

“I had an idea,” she admits, because she had. Josh was antsy, and searching, and likely to start hunting down things to keep him grounded. Sam had always been at the top of that list, even when it burned them both to admit it. “But it’s not my place anymore. To try to clean things up before he can—” She doesn’t want to say _before he can wreck them_ , doesn’t want Sam to even get the word in his head that this is a bad thing because for once it irrevocably isn’t. Josh did the right thing, and all it takes is one moment for Sam to follow suit.

“No, it’s not. But he was serious. This isn’t me seeing what I want to, is it?”

She’s learned a lot in this period of her life. More, she thinks, than she did in those last couple years. She’s learned how to leap, how to stick the landing, and how, if she doesn’t, to get back to her feet. She’s always believed the problem with Sam is that he never looks before he leaps. And sometimes that works, there are some jumps that people can’t make any other way, but for him, this is a double-edged sword. If he looks, he knows just how to talk himself out of it, and if he doesn’t, he can catastrophize until the cows come home.

Still, she knows Josh was serious just like she knows she’s going to figure this report out one way or another. It’s intuitive, a lump in her gut. She knows that Sam coming back would be good at any time, but now it would be perfect and not entirely selfish of her to want. She knows, and that has to be enough.

“For what it’s worth, it’s not always a bad thing to see what you want to see,” she says. She saw what she wanted to and it got her here, after all. “But no, I don’t think it’s just you.”

He nods, and she knows that even without the rustle of fabric or having to ask. “Can you do me another favor?” he asks.

“I might be able to swing it.”

“Tell me what it’s like there now. Tell me how things are with you.”

He can listen just as well as he can speak, and for her he reserves his attention even beyond that, so she tells him without restraint. It’s hard to keep the thrill out of her voice so she doesn’t try, even though everything she’s doing for now is equivalent to mucking out the stalls. She hopes the magic of it rubs off on him through the phone lines.

_ii. negotiated means_

A couple days later the line strings, from her to him this time. A click and—“Things are fine,” said in the same second as, “I haven’t made a decision yet.”

They’re both spectacularly awful at obfuscation.

_ii. cat’s_ _cradle_

She banged her elbow on the doorjamb on the way back from lunch, and now there’s a solid purple bruise fanning across it, the bone pinging with hurt when she forgets. Four a.m. now and she can’t decide if she’s starting her day or finishing the last one, but she can work past the pain.

Her phone vibrates on the corner of her desk and she slumps forward to meet it, lazy fingers drawling over it. She expects Joey, who’s been a gracious enough girlfriend to keep up a stream of texts to see her through the hellish night even though her day on the west coast has been just as long. A premature smile filters onto her lips at the thought, but she doesn’t get Joey’s dry wit and late-night warmth; instead, she gets another insomniac all together.

_Ticket booked. Layover in Wisconsin. If I get stranded do you think I can meet your mom’s cats?_

She laughs hard enough that she can’t feel the outrage in her elbow.

_ii. a_ _genic thing_

“Donna, phone.”

She reaches without looking, feels the receiver press into her palm, still warm from Lynn’s small hands. Lynn who is new, and headstrong, and a fast learner.

“Get on the damn plane,” Donna says simply before shoving the phone back at Lynn, whose face has bloomed into the first genuine smile any of them have seen from her caustic mouth. It lights a fire under Donna’s ass if nothing else, this knowledge that there are still things to be unearthed. Sometimes it feels as though they’ve already expended their resources, know everything there is to know.

She whistles, high and piercing. _“Listen up!”_ and a whole sea turns tide to meet her.

_ii. a genic thing (note from the editor)_

_If you’re not on that damn plane,_ she thinks, _what have I been getting my hopes up for?_

_ii. halite_

And silence so rich it reigns (and pours.) Lynn appointed herself liaison to Dulles when Donna wasn’t looking, says now the connecting flight is grounded. It’s coming down faster than they can haul it out.

_ii. re-recapitulate_

Donna has been avoiding thinking about this month’s phone bill. What’s the point when it’ll show up anyway? And having generally moved up in the world, she can afford the overages.

It’s the joy in knowing that soon, when she calls him from her apartment and drags the scraggly phone cord as far as it’ll go in search of the couch, it won’t be a long distance charge. It’s also the joy in knowing that soon she’ll be able to walk over to an office with his name on it once more. (That office has its memories, but she’ll even be glad to see it, too.)

She tosses her phone back onto her desk—vowing not the check the time again until she accomplishes something—and pinches the bridge of her nose, leaning all the way back in her chair until she’s balanced on the precipice just before falling.

On the other side of the desk, Lynn is chewing someone out through the landline for her and it’s fantastically creative.

_i. picture_ _the sound—metal rushing open;_

“Here,” Lynn says, pushing a flimsy cup of coffee into Donna’s hands. The work hasn’t even begun yet, but the caffeine addictions are alive and well. Donna takes a sip off the top to absolve her eyeballs of their mission to make a break from their sockets, not even minding that it’s darker than she usually takes it. Her head is _pounding_. “Thank you,” she says, not a moment too soon.

When Lynn starts in on not only Donna’s tentative schedule, but what sounds to be a portion of Helen Santos’s as well, Donna’s eyes unfocus. It reminds her acutely of walking into what had amounted as Bartlet’s headquarters back then—phones ringing off the hook and people either rooted in place to take the calls or rushing back and forth to get information to _then_ take the calls. She had been so young then, and unmoored, hadn’t known what she was doing except that it was exactly what she was supposed to.

Lynn is tall, with black hair that ends abruptly at her shoulders, and a permanent peak to her eyebrows. Her face is still an uncut gem of baby-roundness, but she’s got something there that’s dependable. She isn’t Donna, except for the ways in which she is. A godsend in sensible flats with a steady voice that had, Donna realizes now, just shown up one day.

“What are you doing?” Donna asks when she stops talking to instead look at her with that slightly perturbed look.

“Trying to decide if I bored you into a catatonic state or if you’re just losing it,” Lynn says, shifting her weight from one side to the other in barely-housed impatience.

“Losing it, definitely. But I’m talking about—” And she does a hand gesture that might be better suited for landing a very tiny airplane, motioning between the two of them as if to indicate their rapport. It must work because Lynn says, “Assisting you. Do you not feel properly assisted?”

“I've got an assistant?” Donna asks her assistant, but she’s allowed to have lapses. She’s just decided it, in fact—if she’s important enough to have people there to assist her, then she’s allowed to have small, momentary, ultimately painless lapses. “No one told me.”

“You could have one,” Lynn says. She cups her elbows and looks about as bashful as she’s capable of, which isn’t much by any measure, but Donna appreciates the effort. “You _should_ have one. Without me you’ll drown in the paperwork before you ever get moved in. And I enjoy the, um, the environment. If pressed, specifically the people in it.”

It’s a genuine testament to her enjoyment that she was able to get that all out in one go without becoming inexplicably ill. Lynn isn’t grumpy, but she has a hard time saying things that require her to temper the natural dryness she carries. Donna thinks of her as preemptive—she’s got her walls up before there’s ever a sign of threat, and even beyond that she prefers offense to defense. It makes her a hell of a teammate, and moments like these exceedingly special.

The truth is that though Donna may have not hired, picked, or otherwise asked for an assistant, she certainly has one. The proof is in the pudding—or the coffee in hand and schedule rattling around in her head. And Donna knows from experience that the best thing she can do for Lynn in this admittedly awkward moment is to let her get to work without incident. It had surely been the best thing someone had ever done for her, once upon a time.

“Okay,” she says without missing a beat, “What’s next?”

They work side by side for the rest of the afternoon, but if asked point blank, Donna didn’t think she could say exactly what it was they had done. When she tries to think on it, it fuzzes and blurs, memos and transitory things that make a half and whole and no difference all coming together in one lump sum.

At three, or thereabouts, Helen Santos peeks her head in with a look of mild distress and knocks lightly on the door. The distress is equal parts having gotten lost in the hall, which she _won’t_ be telling anyone about, and tension headache, derived from still learning the floorplan and at least forty other things, none so specific as to be candidate for naming or solving.

Lynn makes herself scarce, quiet and efficient, not too obvious at all.

"That was…?” Helen asks anyway, out of nothing more than dread she’s picked up and lost yet another name already. She’s forgotten more names in the last year than people she’s met in her entire life, and her kindness, the burning need inside her to have control over her own _mind_ if nothing else, is taking a toll on her. Donna’s already begun the work of trying to convey that it’s more about the patience and understanding, the willingness to learn rather than the capability or ultimate retention, but she knows it’s easier said than done. She’ll get the hang of it, and if not, Donna is exceptional at making flashcards.

“Lynn Vincent. Just think of her as an extension of me.”

Helen rubs her thumb over her forehead, pinkish-taupeish nail polish starting to crack along the seams. “Lynn?” she repeats wearily.

“Lynn,” Donna agrees.

“I might need flashcards. With little pictures.”

“We aren’t there yet.”

“But you’ll let me know when we are?”

"Maybe. It depends on if I have time to make flashcards.”

As their conversation lulls, Donna takes the quiet to start roping her desk back into order. The report she’d been working on at the beginning of the week is slouched in the corner, littered with bent staples laying hapless around it and binder clips—some broken and some not. Helen stays quiet from her seat by the door, and it’s as normal as it is disconcerting for Donna.

She’d spent some time with and around Dr. Bartlet, enough to count her as both an inspiration and an acquaintance, but Helen Santos was not Abbey Bartlet. They were both upright women, tenacious and compassionate, but Helen hadn’t had the years to train her bluff yet, and sometimes it did her best to sit quietly with Donna and regain her bearings. As her chief of staff, Donna feels it’s well within her job description.

“The kids are doing better,” she says later, apropos of nothing while Donna drags a highlighter over a note that’s already stapled to a reminder. “And they told me to ‘tell Ms. Donna thank you for the card really, really a lot.’ So this is me thanking you really, really a lot.”

Donna smiles with the corners of her lips, small and appropriate. “Good. Tell them they’re really, really welcome.” She doesn’t say— _it must be hard for them, acclimating to any move let alone this one_. She doesn’t add— _I got sick the same time every winter and I liked having the cards to show that someone cared._ She definitely makes no mention of the fact that she prides herself on being beloved by all, even young children, and will go the extra mile to maintain that reputation.

Helen inclines her chin in that simply sophisticated way, affirmative and kind—it reminds Donna unendingly of CJ—and curiously tips her head to the side in the same breath. “Is something wrong?”

“What?” It takes all of Donna’s willpower not to make any number of jokes that are pinballing in her head. Joking, unfortunately, not in the job description, and there are only so many liberties to be taken.

“Are you worried about something, perhaps?”

“Of course not. Why?”

“Because you’re getting Wite-Out everywhere,” she explains plaintively, pointing in her general direction. Donna looks down in time to see a clot of corrective fluid smack the desktop by way of the half-mast bottle in her hand. She jerks her wrist upright, flinging another blob dangerously close to her pants, and tries not to turn anything further than rose in embarrassment. The heat in her ears tells her she’s failing.

“Oh—sorry, I’m.” She jams the sponge back in the bottle before waving her hands in a dusting motion. “Sorry,” she repeats.

"Don’t—”

"Honestly, it’s not even worth—”

“Donna, don’t let the Secret Service guys or the press hear me say this, but I would kill to hear about problems that don’t impact the American public at large.” She laughs, embarrassed, and adds, “I think I actually _miss_ the gossip at the PTA meetings.” 

“Sam landed in the middle of the night,” Donna blurts in one go, “I don’t know when he’s coming in, or if he’s already come in, but he’s definitely coming in today.”

Helen perks up at that. “Oh, this one I know. Seaborn, the ex-speechwriter? Let’s see, he’s taking Josh’s old job as deputy, so Josh can do his chiefly duties without having a daily nervous breakdown. Am I on the money so far?”

“You didn’t even need the flashcard.” (Witty rapport is allowed in the bylines of the job description as long as it’s ultimately a supporting character to the main role.)

Helen _hms_ a close-lipped laugh, her eyes twinkling. “Speaking of money, I’ve heard there’s absolutely _no_ illegal gambling occurring on the premises, but if there were, there would be a bet running as to how long it might take for him to attempt to micromanage Lou in Communications, and for her to then show him what’s what. The entry fee, apparently, would be reasonable, if not downright modest.” When Donna’s eyebrows crowd up her forehead, Helen looks innocently away and says, “Don’t worry, my book club was much worse.

“But now we’re getting somewhere. Why are you—nervous? Worried?—why are you worried about Sam? I was under the impression you were all still friends.”

“I’d say that’s where the worrying begins and ends,” Donna hedges, chipping drying and dried Wite-Out out of the wood grain with her index finger. It clumps under nails in a way that makes her squirm, but since she’s in the thick of it already, she keeps pace. “That sounds—yes, Sam is one of my best friends. But the last time, when he left, it wasn’t messy, but it wasn’t exactly an easy situation, and there was…it hurt. It hurt me and it hurt our friends, and I know it hurt him. So many things have changed, and he wasn’t here to see them. I don't want us all to get our hopes up again only to....”

“Lose him again, maybe for good," she interprets in that billowing tone of hers, giving just enough and still catching on. When Helen says it, it all sounds a little more reasonable than the frantic tone it’s taking in the back of Donna’s mind.

“I really think this time is going to be different. We’re all—older, definitely, wiser, maybe not. I like to think we’ve learned a few things, but that’s my secret. If they know that they’ll just get big heads about it.”

“Hope is good; it never hurt anyone around here. Even if it is in the maturity of Josh and, I assume by extension, Sam.”

“I trust Josh with my life, but I’d never wager my hope on his ability to be mature outside of his work. And even that’s….” She does a so-so gesture that makes Helen laugh brightly and say, “It’s also good to have boundaries.”

“That’s the lesson I _know_ we haven’t learned. You know, when I worked on the Russell campaign, everyone was so _polite_. It was just—I just wanted someone to barge in, you know, or yell my name even though they were two feet away, or bother me about something inane. And I realized, I don’t think we’ll ever find that anywhere else, not any of us, unless we’re together in some way. It doesn’t matter who’s in that office, if it’s us outside—we’re family. So I came back home, but Sam…it’s been four years, four years of lifetimes.” She’s shakes her head, trying and failing to make sense of what it is exactly she’s trying to say. She hasn’t had time to devote to any one thing in _months_ , so weighing this, figuring out just how much headspace it was taking up, none of it has happened yet. Not her finest moment to find it all out in front of the incoming First Lady, but Donna has had less fine moments and will undoubtedly have more.

Helen shifts in her seat, crossing one leg over the other and leaning forward to balance her elbow on her knee. It’s a move that bizarrely reminds Donna of the daytime talk shows she used to watch when she would stay home from school, but she suspects it’s less about rapt interest and more for the fact that the chairs are hell to sit in for longer than five minutes.

“Don’t you think that as odd as it is for you to have him back, it’s the same for him, _being_ back? You said yourself he left under less than ideal terms, and from what I gathered, third-hand by the time it got to me, that’s not an inapt way of putting it.”

“If Sam were a mouse he’d make friends with the cat,” Donna says, sounding like her grandmother, which is a good thing only sometimes. “He’s going to fall right back in. That’s the problem, or most of the problem, there are other, more nebulous problems, but him falling back in _too_ quickly is at the top. He has to figure out what all the changes mean for him. He’s deputy now, he’s got, there’s weight there, more than he had as Communications deputy. But I don’t want it to sound like hiring Sam is anything short of the miracle it is; he’s trustworthy, and a hard worker, and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met. I _know_ he’s going to be amazing at this, because he wants to be, and that’s all it takes.”

Her fingers curled against her cheek, Helen says, “Between you and me then, I think it’s all going to work out.”

“Sorry, was that—that was a lot, wasn’t it?”

“It was nice. I don’t think you realize how nice it is to hear that people still care about other people after the year I’ve had, and I know there’s four more ahead of us, and too many things that I don’t have the foresight to anticipate, but I’m glad I chose you, Donna. I think your compassion is going to go a long way in helping me make this all something worthwhile.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

They try to navigate back to familiar terrain, but Donna can hear the beginnings of Lynn’s voice coming up the hall, and it sends her to her feet. She sounds agitated, Donna thinks, and there’s no telling what’s collapsing outside of the relative safety of Donna’s office.

She gets as far as her hand on the doorframe and her head around the corner before her whole body hitches. Lynn’s there all right, her face animated as she expels the longest string of words Donna has heard from her as of yet, and Sam is listening intently at her elbow.

He has his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, glasses tucked at the hollow of his throat. Hair cropped close and new furrows between his eyebrows. The closer he gets, the darker the skin under his eyes looks—he always looks like he’s gone ten rounds after he flies, she remembers, and she’s never been more glad to remember a piece of inane trivia in her life.

 _"Sam,”_ she calls, and he perks up instantly, a brilliant smile cutting across his face when he sees her. _“Donna,”_ he replies in the same reverent tone.

He brings his hand around and Lynn snags his jacket before he can even think what to do with it, folding it neatly over her arm as Donna and Sam wrap their arms around one another in the doorway to Donna’s office. Donna can’t stop herself from laughing, because he’s stale airplane air and tart shampoo and warmth, real arms around her and a real chin digging into her shoulder.

“Hi,” she says into the crook of his neck, eyes closed. Her heart clenches in her chest, but it’s the best. She wouldn’t trade it for anything.

He squeezes her once before pulling back so they can look at one another. It’s been far too long since they’ve been able to do this. Anger wells up in Donna and she swipes his shoulder reproachfully. “Don’t you dare run across the country again,” she says with the lethal precision of someone with their eyes narrowed and their hand ready to administer more corrective swipes. “I mean it, I’ll, I’ll do something. I don’t know what, but you know I will, and it won’t be pretty.”

There’s a laugh from inside Donna’s office, understated but amused, that cuts him off before he can respond. Confusion clouds Sam’s face until he cranes around her shoulder to see Helen rising to her feet.

“Mrs. Santos,” Sam greets, and it aches of respect and boyish charm, a combination Donna has never seen anyone pull off so well as him.

“It’s nice to finally put a face to the name, Mr. Seaborn,” she replies. “See what all the fuss is about.”

“Sam’s fine,” he says behind Donna interjecting, “No one’s been fussing.”

“Josh has been fussing,” Helen says.

“Josh has been fussing,” Donna agrees.

“And if I remember correctly, you were just fussing.”

“I might have fussed a little.”

“I have two children, Donna. You fussed like a newborn, you were very fussy.”

Donna doesn’t have to see his face to know Sam’s eyes are sparking with amusement. She briefly considers stepping on his foot, but decides to let it pass. There’ll be plenty of opportunity for that in the coming days. “I fussed,” she relents, “But I would still like to refute the designation.”

“And I note your refutation. Sam, I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again soon, but it really was nice to finally meet you. Donna, I’m supposed to be somewhere, I’m sure—where am I supposed to be?”

“With the decorator. Again,” Donna says with at least a modicum of apology. Behind her, Lynn exhales louder than strictly necessary—she has about as much love for the decorator as a dog does for fleas.

Helen’s smile turns tight and she shoots Donna a look that asks _can’t I just be hit over the head with one of these inordinately large books instead?_ Donna knows that’s what that look means because it was the exact look she was giving when she’d asked that question before the _last_ meeting with the decorator. “Duty calls, then,” she murmurs when Donna doesn’t change her tune. As Helen steps out into the hallway, Lynn chucks Sam’s jacket at his chest and pulls the door behind them.

“I don’t think Lynn likes me,” he says into the newfound quiet.

Donna gestures him to Helen’s vacated seat and takes up her own once more. “She’ll like you better next week. The people at Dulles kept giving her the run around.”

“If it makes her feel any better, the same can be said about my time in Milwaukee.”

There’s a beat of silence reserved for them cataloguing the new and the old, and then:

“Sam—”

“Donna—”

They pause, smiles twisting. “You go,” he says.

“This is real, right? This is you?”

“Yeah, it's me,” he says with a soft smile. “Though in the interest of full disclosure, I went to see Josh before I came to find you, and he’s--I may have threatened to leave again, if he doesn’t take a week off.”

Donna wants to be mad he would even joke about leaving again, she wants to feel her righteousness burn all the way down to her fingertips, but all that comes is a burst of laughter straight from her core. “You did _what?_ ”

“You know! He’s all over the place on his best days, and now it’s cranked up to eleven. He’s going to kill himself before they can ever swear Santos in. I told him to take a vacation or I walk.”

“Walk all the way back to California?”

“California was mentioned, but it’s more like the apartment downtown I signed a year’s lease on. I figure striking a little fear,” He gestures magnanimously, hand curling up at the end. "Couldn’t hurt any more than what he’s already doing to himself.”

"That’s surprisingly Machiavellian of you.”

“I hit a growth spurt while I was away.”

She grins, leaning back against her seat. She likes the way he says it— _away_ , like he was always meant to come back. Donna had known that, but she didn’t know he did, too.

“Donna,” he starts again, levelling his eyes on hers. Words bunched up between his hands and between his teeth. “Before all the rest, I want to say I’m really happy for you. It’s—I know things are complicated, but this, all of this,” he gestures to the office, to her. “It’s the easy part. You deserve this, you always have, and I’m immensely gratified to get to call you a colleague as well as a friend.”

A small _oh_ plucks at her throat, but it doesn’t make its way out. She struggles to find anything adequate to say back, but there’s only one thing in her head and, she figures, it always bears repeating. “I’m really glad you came back.” And that, she knows, means to him just the same as what he’d said to her.

_i. pavers (abridged)_

There are some conversations it’s easier to have while racing the condensation on beer bottles, first to the bottom of the label wins. She’s leveraging her winning streak with a grin, even though it’s not beer bottles tonight, but frosty glasses with jubilant citrus designs she bought for a buck fifty a piece at a street market when she first got to town.

There are some stones that are best turned over, fresh dirt underneath fingernails. It’s not that she hasn’t tried to keep her mouth shut, it’s just that she doesn’t really want to try at all and that makes it pretty easy to slip.

Out of kindness, or respect, maybe in the spirit of the age old _I told you about my thing so now the only decent thing you can do is tell me about yours_ , she goes first. Her relationship isn’t really the kind gossip is made of, it’s boat wood built, strong and yielding. She’s in love and as easily as she admits that to herself she can admit it to him. She does it quick to catch him off guard, because he’s never been around to see her like this, and it has its intended effect—he almost chokes on his cranberry juice, which is all she had in her fridge when they hustled into her apartment at ten past eleven. She grins at that, too.

It’s about fair trade then, it’s about the decent thing to do that isn’t so much decent as it is the things he won’t admit to himself that he wants to say. He doesn’t lie, because lying gives him hives, but he puts up a bit of a fight so she doesn’t feel the triumph of getting everything out of him by the time the sun comes up.

There are some people that believe your lover should be your best friend, and there are some people who believe you should fall in love with your best friend, and there are some people, like him, who believe that friendship is a form of love that reaches and if you’re lucky sometimes it grabs hold of something. He has been properly grabbed hold of, a painful squeezing on his heart for years now, and he starts prying the fingers off that night on her couch, because there are some people who have to learn along the way that to love is not always to hurt, and she’s as good a teacher as any.

_i. pavers (unabridged)_

(Donna pulls her hair out of its ponytail and rolls the hair-tie up her wrist. It eats into her skin, already knotting a red line all the way around. Her eyes turn woozy with relief—her hair has been pulling on a tension headache all day—and fall shut, just for a moment while she’s looking up at the ceiling. At the foot of her couch his ice-and-cranberry rattles against the insides of his glass and she can’t even bear to be embarrassed about the fact that she hasn’t been grocery shopping in over a week because she _knows_ , unequivocally, that he gets it.)

“If he asked. If he asked, would you have stayed?”

“Do you really not know the answer?”

“It’s good for you to say out loud. There’s _power_ in _verbalization_ , or so I’ve been told.”

“More self-help books from your mom?”

“She sent one that came in on Valentine’s Day, if you can believe it. Surprisingly violent— _There’s a Rattle in the Engine: How To Tune The Motor of Your Life.”_

“You’re kidding. Was there a note?”

"Oh, there was a note, my friend. In fact, there was more than one note, because there was more than one book. Sam, my own mother sent me the world’s crappiest self-help book because she ‘worries about my stress levels,’ but in that very same package she included a book on Amelia Earhart for my girlfriend because she somehow retained from the half dozen conversations they’ve had in the last three years that Joey is, in fact, a fan of Amelia Earhart.”

"That seems counterintuitive to her plans for your nervous system. I’ll be outraged on your behalf.”

“I’m just saying, _all_ I’m saying, is that maybe I would like a nice, pleasant read about any number of historical figures. This is me making clear I could rally behind historical nonfiction if it were presented to me.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“And you know the worst thing?” (She breezes past his question because she hasn’t actually given any thought to how she would rally behind historical fiction if the option were presented to her. She’ll think on it, get back to him.) “I wasn’t even upset about it. I’m still not. When I opened the box, when I saw the books with the notes stuck to the covers, I was just…you know, I was relieved. It’s been years, but every time it’s like something inside of me sighs. Because there was the note where my mom called me by my childhood nickname—which I _won’t_ be telling you, so don’t even ask—and then there was her lovely, personal note to Joey, and there were our names together in this box. So that wasn’t the day I woke up to find out it was all some sort of dream, it was just another day where I realized—this is real, this is me getting to love Joey, even if it means my mom sends her the better books. And I do love her; she’s it for me, Sam. So the books are an easy trade.”

(He mumbles something that sounds like _oh wow_ and almost spills watery cranberry juice on her couch. She wouldn’t mind if he had. She needs a new couch, and he needs to hear this.)

“My mother isn’t fond of books not written by TV evangelists,” (he says, laughing in a self-deprecating, rolling-his-neck-so-he-doesn’t-have-to-look-at-her way) “or people interviewed on _Oprah_.”

“You can borrow mine.”

“It would have just boiled over somewhere else. If I hadn’t gone, it might have taken longer, but it was coming either way.”

“I know.”

“And I—I think would have, if he asked. I was always going to leave the White House, I didn’t have another four years in me, not then. I had to leave, but it didn’t have to be for California.”

(She’s long figured that out. He was miserable here, but he was miserable there, and at least here he could have had his people around him. At least here he would have had something to fight for instead of letting all the fight go out of him.) “Are you ever going to tell him that?”

“What, now? When he’s finally, when we’ve _both_ finally—I think this is the first time in a decade that we’ve both been out of a tailspin at the same time. That’s, you _know_ that’s a minor miracle.”

“That’s your problem. No really, that, right there, that’s your problem. But you’re the kid sitting so close to the TV you can’t even _see it_. Are you allergic to happiness? Because I’ve never seen one person so hellbent on subverting their own happiness. You could be a medical marvel, I should ship you off to be part of a travelling sideshow attraction and wash my hands of it all.”

“Are you going to keep kicking me while I’m—what, vulnerable? It’s starting to feel mean-spirited.”

“It’s this notion you’ve got in your head that romance, that love, that Josh is your tailspin, or that you’re his, or that any of this—Sam, you’ve been hurt before. I appreciate the gravity of that. But we all have, okay? And it shapes us into who we are—not the people who hurt us, they don’t get any of the credit, but the ways we grabbed back onto life, that makes an impact.

“So I know you think you need to go to the ER the minute your heart starts kicking again, because that leads to love and love leads to pain, but have you ever stopped to consider, even for a second, that the one place that’s solid ground for you is wherever you are with him? It’s when you’re with him, and when the terms are good. And I know that because I’ve been watching for years and I can tell you that when you two are out of balance, that’s when it all crumbles. He came to get you Sam. Because that’s how this works, that’s how you two _work_ , and it’s getting really hard to watch you miss out on that just because you think you don’t deserve to be happy.”

(Enter stage right: shock clapping in thunderous key on his face. He runs a hand experimentally over it, like he’s checking to make sure it’s still there. She can’t blame him, it was pretty face-meltingly well-worded.)

"The first thing I did when I got here is told him to leave,” (he pronounces, incredulous, and Donna tries to ease into her laughter, but she feels as though she’s earned the right to laugh at inappropriate times.)

"You’re a playground bully, Sam Seaborn.”

“He has to go. I wasn’t wrong about that, he has to go before his head splits in half, but. The _first_ thing?”

(She says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world,) “He has to go. But he has to come back too, you know.”

(And it is. That simple, at least. Josh goes and Josh comes back and Sam goes and now he comes back, too.)

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @cauldronoflove !! as you can see i not only take prompts but i blow them way out of proportion too :^)


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